A “Gaggle of Cranks and Parasites”

Is how Christopher Hitchens describes:
Rev. Jeremiah Wright,
Rev. Al Sharpton,
Rev. James Meeks, and
Louis Farrakhan.

The thing that this gaggle of cranks and parasites has in common is the extreme deference with which it is treated by the junior senator from Illinois. In April 2004, Barack Obama told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times that he had three spiritual mentors or counselors: Jeremiah Wright, James Meeks, and Father Michael Pfleger…

Obama has tried to distance himself from these men and what they teach, trying to stand aloof from the discussion. Hitchens on Obama:

…He seems, indeed, to have a real gift for remaining adequately uninformed about the real beliefs of his “mentors.”

In Hitchen’s piece, Obama Is No King, he compares Obama’s “mentors” to MLK.

Four decades after the murder in Memphis of a friend of the working man—a hero who was always being denounced by the FBI for his choice of secular and socialist friends and colleagues—the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists who hope to franchise “race talk” into a fat living for themselves. Far from preaching truth and brotherhood, they trade in cheap slander and paranoia and in venomous dislike of other minorities.

Gee, Christopher… Tell us how you really feel! And what about Obama, the politician of change! The one who can “transcend race”?

...So amnesiac have we become, indeed, that we fall into paroxysms of adulation for a ward-heeling Chicago politician who does not complete, let alone “transcend,” the work of Dr. King; who hasn’t even caught up to where we were four decades ago; and who, by his chosen associations, negates and profanes the legacy that was left to all of us.

Typically tart tongued Hitchens scores again!
Hat tip to Hot Air.
Cross posted at Say Anything